Book 6. Chapter 43: Wrong address
Drakonis got to work setting the camp up. Which wasn’t a huge amount of work, since we’d arrived with practically nothing on our backs. What camp ended up being was some firewood stacked up just outside the tunnel entrance, along with some hunted meat, fish and edible leaves along with refilled water flasks.
After which he sat down and disassembled his rifle and pistol, cleaning up the interior and verifying everything was in good shape.
Meanwhile, I was doing the heavy lifting inside the mite terminal. But from his point of view, I was just sitting down and sleeping by said terminal.
The terminal itself didn’t have any actual damage within the server, just the outside had been sliced by Murdershrimp. But the step into this terminal was… off putting. I remember the last time I’d walked into a mite terminal and seen what the inside looked like.
The digital sea was far above me in this terminal, past a ceiling of windowed glass. The ground under my feet moved like a slow steady wave. Stairs sprouted from the ground at all kinds of angles, some leading to airlocks that hovered in midair without any visible support or anything behind them.
Gears were everywhere. And for every possible reason. All moving around. Even the ground seemed to occasionally break away into slowly spinning gears. I think some of the stairs were made of gears too. Each time a rotation finally clicked, they’d all turn and move in different directions. And every few rotations, some of the airlock doors leading to nowhere would light up green and open up, revealing some other part of the server on the other side of the doorway, even though there shouldn’t be anything on the other side.
The machine archive I’ve visited with Father had been filled with sediment and a complete lack of motion from the actual archive itself. Only the ecosphere and defense programs around it were in motion. Here, the entire architecture was alive and moving, and everything living inside here seemed more like a guest.
“Three gods in an airspeeder…” I muttered looking at the absolute mayhem around me. And this was just a passing station. I wasn’t looking to stay inside the mite terminal, I needed to get out into the open digital sea, and from there find a way to contact Wrath.
Fortunately, gravity seemed more a suggestion, so a quick push off my feet and I was floating through the chaos around me. There was still a pull backwards to the moving ground, but enough gears and staircases let me leap from spot to spot, making my way up.